"To
my mind, the notion that negative reviews are a dialectical antidote to the
vague praise and careerist back-patting often found in poetry reviews is
founded on a mistake. There is no good reason to think that negative reviews
are ipso facto any more honest, more intelligent, freer of strategy,
instrumentality, or profit-motive than positive reviews. Negative is not the
same as critical. The negative reviewer is shrewd enough to moneyball the
marketplace: he understands that in an economy rife with praise-inflation,
vitriol can code as honesty, and ridicule may seem refreshing because it is so
rare. His operation risks devolving into spectacle. The idea that negative
reviews should be more “honest” or “refreshing” than positive reviews is
symptomatic of the fantasy that there might be a place where the dynamics of
economy and careerism are suspended, and the voice of truth can pour forth
undiluted by ulterior motives. The main problem with negative reviews is that
they’re too similar to positive reviews. The poetry criticism I admire most
spends less time praising or blaming—which often amounts to leveraging the
reviewer’s cultural capital and verbal virtuosity to muscle readers into
assimilating that reviewer’s taste—and more time describing and contextualizing
with intelligence and gusto. Of course, no reviewer could ever remove his taste
or politics from his descriptions; the very choice of an object for attention
is a function of such things. But I think we’d all learn a lot more about
what’s happening in poetry if reviewers leaned less heavily on overt statements
of aesthetic judgment, positive or negative, and more on close analysis."

Monday, May 6, 2013

Elizabeth Bachinsky's The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, by Nightwood Editions, and Sara Peters’1996, by House of Anansi Press, ask more from their respective audiences than casual reading. These
books demand participation from readers. If you are looking for poems bound
together with easy observations, or a familiar jog through a personal lyric,
you will come away disappointed. Both Canadian poets attempt to do quite the
opposite: to undomesticate the world, to set things on fire with their minds,
to rattle the cages of readers and by doing so, to reinvigorate the
imagination.

Bachinsky’s book begins with the
lines “I can see now that I once was quite feral. / Getting older was my
education in becoming civilized” from the poem “You Know What Readers Like”.
This is an apt description for how a reader feels when reading her poems for
although the point of view is decidedly personal, the “voice” in her poems
displays a powerful self-awareness suspicious of where it finds itself.
Bachinsky’s book is rife with images of urban sprawl and
superficiality—googling blondes, Telly Savalas, Nails salons, Venice Beach—all
of which are treated by the poet as memento
moris of a western civilization in decline. A popular culture that has
become a plastic church.

This cocktail of high and low
culture might be dismissed by others as mere ‘cool-hunting’, Bachinsky angling
for a kind of bohemian sophistication, except for the fact that the wilderness
intrudes in many of the poems. There is a picture postcard-worthy lake that is
actually only three feet deep and choked with ragweed. A mountain rises in the
distance above a passing train full of commuters. The speaker in another poem
rides her thorough-bred horse through an empty subdivision where there are “no
trees, just a razed cow field / where developers built and we moved in.” This poem ends with the lines, “my big dark horse, waiting / for me to come on back
/ outside” which implies nature on the ragged fringes, living outside society’s frame, is a place of spiritual renewal.

Take, for example, her poem “The
Spider’s Alphabet” which appears in its entirety below:

The Spider’s Alphabet

Once in rural Japan my good friend Allan joined a fascinated
throng

in watching a white
spider meander across a market square,

a white spider whose body was fat as a man’s hand whose
slender

legs tested the
earth as a woman’s might test the surface of a lake

mid-May—then it moseyed. And when I first moved from the
city

to the woods
outside Vancouver, I evicted two from my laundry

room, an old married couple, bodies each a good inch long,
grey-brown.

They were pissed.
They lived without a web. They were hunters’

the whole length of their basement window replete with
corpses:

fat blackflies,
millipedes. A real nice set-up. I screamed!

But all summer in the press room, I have watched a thin
brown thing spin

webs behind the
type cases. And I have thought of E.B. White,

his Charlotte, and what I would do with my Charlotte after
she,

feeling safe, spun
her pale yellow sac near the small window

that opens onto your derelict English garden. I watched the
sac hatch

and for weeks
afterwards I found spiderlings among the liagatures.

We worked together. Me, dissing type while the little ones
wove

through the
alphabet. Now—the wolves who stalk through

my house at night?—they keep my tabby entertained.

In the day, I leave
my windows open, and my doors. Yet how

pest-free my house remains! Some nights I dream of eight
eyes and wake

to unexpected cash.
Strange. This fall when I move back to

the city with its silverfish and exorbitant rent, I think I
will summon

spiders. It is best
to live with them. To let them into the house.

By Liz Bachinsky

There is so much to love in this poem — the white spider and
the fascinated Japanese throng, the move between the city and the woods, the
allusion to E.B. White’s Charlotte's Web — all of which implies a connection to nature is important because it
resets or awakens the imagination. This is certainly how I take the meaning of
the last lines where the speaker says, “Strange. This fall when I move back to
/ the city with its silver fish and exorbitant rent, I think I will summon /
spiders. It is best to live with them. To let them into the house.”

What Bachinsky places squarely in her cross-hairs in The Hottest Summer in Recorded History is
not only urban-planning run amok but the gentrification of consciousness. Just
when readers find themselves getting too comfortable in a poem, out come the
bull-whips and the tiny wooden armadillos, the hobbled horses and the jimmied
keyholes, the plastic paparazzi playsets and the zombie finger puppets.

Elizabeth Bachinsky uses her bursting lyricism and wide-ranging eye to seek the borders
between the feral, i.e. the wild, and a recycled culture so obsessed with its
own past it is unable to create any new meaning.

Sara Peters also wants to make her readers uncomfortable
in her new book 1996, but she does
this more directly, employing an overtly surrealist approach. ”As a teenager,
there are several ways to get your parents’ attention. / Only one of these ways
is to set things on fire with your mind.” So begins Sara Peters’ poem “Mary
Ellen Spook” and it quickly sets her readers on pins and needles for her poems work against
easy observation.

Like Bachinsky, Peters creates tension between
things familiar and fabulous, leaving her readers feeling unfixed and detached.
There is a dream-like quality to many of her poems. In “Bionic”, a twenty-two
year old brother believes he is bionic and is looking after a senile mother
whom he dresses in a t-shirt that reads, “I kill everything I fuck // I fuck
everything I kill.” In “Your Life as Lucy Maud Montgomery”, a menacing Ann of
Green Gables makes an appearance carrying a butterfly knife. In “Camden 14”, a
boy sets himself on fire in the middle of a neighborhood.

Reading her poem “Cryptid” below, it becomes clear how
Peters employs surreal imagery to create a dream-like atmosphere, both transgressive
and distorted, in order to shake up her readers.

Cryptid

You saw her once, at Margaree Harbour,

when you were a three-year-old boy called Oscar.

While you staggered over the sand,

slippery with SPF 50,

your parents humped on the beach towel,

to Lou Reed singing “Sweet Jane.”

Lipless, lidless, five slits in her throat,

her rosy larynx furled in and out.

You laughed at her boa: seaweed, rusted forks.

She tore up a starfish, swallowed its points.

You offered, as truce, some Sun-Maid raisins.

She spread out, to amuse you, all forty fingers.

Finding you gone, your father sprinted over the sand

(long-legged, in one Birkenstock)

While your mother stayed right
there!, sat on her heels,

gasping into a brown paper bag.

Later, your parents noticed the salt taste of your skin,

called you their potato chip.

Your mother combed sand from your hair,

your father found beach grass in your bed.

Now they sleep to the sound of rogue waves crashing.
Dreaming,

they pick their way through dying jellyfish

to find you waiting (not for them) behind a rock,

content amid the iridescent quivering.

By Sara Peters

Immediately, readers are swept into this dream-like scene with
the use of the second-person pronoun transforming them into a three year old
boy named Oscar. The parents dry-humping on a beach towel, the eerie lilting
guitar and dead-pan bluesy voice of Lou Reed singing “Sweet Jane”, the
sea-creature with her boa of seaweed and rusted forks, all of these images
evoke the poem’s chimerical fantasy, which reminds me here a little of a poem
by Larry Levis “Inventing the Toucan”.

It is as if Peters, distrustful of mimicry or imitation
of any kind, fears her images will fade into a poem’s background, becoming mere wallpaper, so awakens or ignites her audience’s attention by allowing her
poems to participate in the fantastical and the surreal.

Sara Peters’ large-minded
speculative vision is not interested in a carbon copy world of appearances, but
in the “throbbing interior” of her imagination.

Stanley Plumly has said, “Resemblances are our masks for
meaning” but both Bachinsky and Peters never let their readers get
too comfortable with such masks. Please pick up Elizabeth Bachinsky’s The Hottest Summer in Recorded History,
published by Nightwood Editions, and Sara Peters’ 1996, published by House of Anansi Press, at your local bookstore.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

“I wasn’t
consciously trying to make anything accessible, nor was I trying, on the other
hand to be obscure or priestly, as the Modernists tried to be. I have nothing
against being accessible. I think there’s certain pleasure in that—the poems
being vulnerable to being understood. A lot of young poets don’t want to be understood,
because they feel that when they’re understood, they’re dead. But I think that
fear only comes from criticism—the vast inhibition they get from reading
critics who, because they can understand something, simply decide not to deal
with it. I think it’s very difficult to deal with a fantastically complete,
utterly accessible lyric by Thomas Hardy, which already says everything it
intends to say. It defies criticism. It says Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler,
sure, come ahead, say what you have to say: I’ll make you look hopeless.

Donald Justice
comes to mind in this way. He wanted to write a poem so completely that the
only thing he could say about it that would be accurate would be its
recitation. Larkin thought that, too. You’ll find very little high-powered
criticism about Larkin. You can’t do it. His poetry is too shrewd, too cunning,
too mean. Scrupulously mean as Joyce said. Now I like that….as a method in art.
Not because I have anything against criticism, which is unavoidable and
necessary and as natural as breathing…But to make a poem that absolutely declares
everything, one that has no hidden resources or anything—I mean, that’s another
idea, you see.”

Friday, March 29, 2013

Poetry month is fast approaching and I am already thrilled
by the fine selection on offer from Canada’s poetry publishers this spring.

I am eagerly anticipating the full slate of new collections published by Nightwood Editions this season. I have started reading Elizabeth Bachinsky’s The Hottest Summer in Recorded Historyand Sara Peter’s 1996, published by House of Anansi press, and a
blog post about both of these lovely books is starting to take shape.

As
for my own scribbling, I wish I was writing more poetry at this time of year,
but teaching and being a father keep me occupied. I hope to finish my
poetry chapbook Invaders sometime in late summer, and a manuscript of essays I
have been gathering together over the last couple of years is in the final
stages.

Finally,
the poet Barry Dempster was kind enough to ask me to be part of a Canadian
Poetry celebration at the Richmond Hill Public Library on April 6 from 1-4 pm.
Barry and I will be reading along side fantastic poets John Steffler, Susan
Gillis, Maureen Scott Harris, and Susan Glickman. It should be a fun afternoon.

About Me

Raised in the Ontario communities of Bancroft, Sioux Lookout and Stayner, Chris Banks took his BA at the University of Guelph, a Master’s in Creative Writing at Concordia and an education degree at Western. His first book, Bonfires, received the 2004 Jack Chalmers Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award. His second collection, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, was published in 2006. His most recent book Winter Cranes was published in the Fall of 2011 by ECW Press. Banks lives in Waterloo. Contact him at: royal.banksy@gmail.com